mcdm

The Story So Far

Added 2025-01-25 03:28:09 +0000 UTC

In the beginning there was funky dice … then, lo, came two dice each of six sides … then the designers said, “Nay! Let it be two dice with sides of ten!” These seismic changes are but a fraction of the story of Draw Steel.

It’s James. Over the last few months, we’ve gotten a bunch of new Patrons. Welcome and thank you! We thought it might help folks old and new to bring you all up to speed with where we’ve gone and how we got to this point in the development of Draw Steel.

By the way, if you are a patron and want access to our patrons-only Discord channel on the MCDM Discord server, go ahead and link your Patreon and Discord accounts.

Playtest Packets

If you’re curious about the overall evolution of Draw Steel and want a REALLY in-depth look at how the game’s evolved, you could dive into each of the playtest packets we’ve put together for folks. They’re all linked below. None of these are the most current version of the game (which is currently going through editing).

Patreon Packet 1 from December 2023
Patreon Packet 2 from July 2024
Backer Packet 1 from August 2024
Patreon Packet 3 from October 2024
Patreon Packet 4 from December 2024 (this playtest includes the stuff from Backer Packet 2)

While these packets show HOW the game has changed, to understand WHY, you need to get into our developer posts right here on Patreon. I’m going to break it down section by section for you with our most pertinent posts, so that you don’t have to navigate through two years of weekly posts chronologically to find each post on kits or classes.

Also, if you want to understand what the game was like for a year BEFORE we put out Patreon Packet 1, then our posts linked below are the places to go!

In the Beginning

In January 2023, MCDM announced a big change to this Patreon and to our work in general. Matt and I had been tinkering with the idea of creating our own original RPG for a while, and the circumstances were right to move that homemade rocket from the backyard of ideas up onto the front burner of the stove of labor. (This metaphor is more mixed than a jar of Planters, but you get the idea.) At that point, we didn’t know much about the game that would become Draw Steel, but we did come up with four keywords that served as design objectives for our game: tactical, heroic, cinematic fantasy.

A week later, the design team at MCDM got together and had five days of intense meetings and brainstorming. We even came up with some rules and ran some playtests! You can read about those initial meetings here:

Day 1: This is one of the first times we talked about the null result on Patreon and our objective to eliminate it for Draw Steel combat. It’s a guiding principle of the game!
Day 2: Matt discusses the fact that Draw Steel isn’t a generic fantasy game, but a game with a specific point of view made to tell heroic stories about battling evil.
Day 3: This is one of the first instances of us talking about doing away with the roll to hit, but we’re using a system of opposed rolls to do it. Matt also gushes about the now defunct cosmic die.
Day 4: Here we talk about simply doing away with the roll to hit and rolling damage! Hey! That’s still in the game.
Day 5: Now we’re starting to get into the finer points of the game. We talk about how death and dying could work and also why crits should be an extra action. These things also ended up in the game.

If you’re familiar with the latest iteration of Draw Steel, you’ll know that a lot of what’s in these initial posts gets scrapped. We thought we were going to use funky dice, aka dice with custom symbols like the kind you need to play the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire roleplaying game.

The main idea is that these dice would have different symbols, swords to indicate your damage, surges to power up your abilities, and crits to indicate when you got a crit!

This is what the game looked like in the early days. We had Heroic Resources and we wanted to eliminate the null result, but we had yet to discover the power roll, Recoveries, Victories, and respites in our core mechanic and gameplay loop.

Developing the Core

Everyone hates leg day, but for me it’s the core workouts that are hardest and most rewarding. You’re supposed to engage your core in pretty much every physical exercise you do from lifting weights to stretching, so when you have a workout that builds strength in your core it tends to improve your overall performance.

Designing an RPG is similar. The core of the game you create is the foundation that you build all your other rules on top of. The strength of those systems depends on a healthy core, so we knew nailing that was the right thing to do. It took a long time for us to get that right!

Days of Dice Dev

The game started funky, with different symbols on different dice. After our first week of meetings, we developed a system that had you building a dice pool every time you made an attack or test. There was a d6 Proficiency Die, a d8 Attribute Die, a d12 Impact Die (used to represent situational bonuses), and our d12 Cosmic Die. You can read more about how that all worked here.

It was only a couple months into testing this that we realized the Cosmic Die was presenting some issues. We wanted it to be so cool that you wanted to roll it, but we found that rolling it became THE way to defeat encounters and that players basically planned around “rolling the die as early as possible.” While we could have continued playing with it, we decided that in a heroic game, strategy and the strength of a hero should count for more than luck and fate, and ultimately scrapped it (though the die could return in future products because we love it). We also found that the Impact Die worked well for situational bonuses, but we needed another kind of die (a Bane Die) for situational penalties.

A month later we had new funky dice! Attribute Dice and Impact Dice are gone and we now have a d12 Action Die and d6 Boon Dice and d6 Bane Dice. We were also starting to implement these dice outside of combat for tests as you can see from the linked post. The early tests of this system were more promising, but the math needed tweaking. How many successes and failures and how many sides there were on each die was something I kept playing with. I was determined we test different combinations of probabilities until we get it right. I did that for several months as we built out other parts of the game. It all culminated in a big in-person playtest at MCDM HQ and when I looked at the probability curve ….

It was basically the same odds as rolling 2d6. At least we came by it honestly. At the same time, we realized that surges (in this instantiation) were basically being used the same as heroic resources to generate unique things you could do with your abilities. Ultimately we scrapped that version of surges (and they didn’t show back up for a long time) and moved to a model that used 2d6 as the core of our dice rolls.

You can see what this looks like in an early preview of the tactician. We had the Core 2d6 dice that were used in every roll, and then some rolls would add bonus d6 Impact Dice (yeah they came back, but instead of situational, they were built into abilities). Then Boon and Bane Dice were d4s that would add or subtract to a roll.

We liked this core enough to use it in our first Patreon playtest. Then we got your feedback (and thank goodness for it). The biggest piece of feedback we got from all of you was that rolling 2d6 for damage for every attack made creatures feel very much the same and that Boon and Bane Dice were hard to track. You felt rolling to hit a target number for a test was fine but boring. It was clear we needed a new approach.

We tried a whole bunch of different mechanics. None of them did what we wanted them to do. But then, inspired by the Powered by the Apocalypse games and Epic Spell Wars, we tried something Matt dubbed the power roll. We tried and liked it. Sure, we messed around with circumstantial bonuses quite a bit before we landed on the current instantiation of edges and banes. But the power roll was working! In a few months, we realized we needed a wider range of results, and we changed the power roll from 2d6 to 2d10.

Rise of Respites and Victories

While figuring out the core dice mechanic of the game, we were also working on the gameplay loop. We knew we wanted a heroic game that inspired you to push on and wanted battles to remain exciting and fun for players after the first round and to have your adventuring day get more interesting as it goes on. Heroic resources have been part of that equation from the beginning.

We tried a lot of different ways of generating heroic resources. There was initially a cap to how many you could get during combat and then you could use those resources outside of combat to fuel other abilities. Generating heroic resources was tied to the use of Signature Abilities. You could generate some reliably each round and then more if you used your signature ability. This seemed to work fairly well, until we started testing these ideas with people outside of the design team. Our playtest coordinators found that because resources were generated in combat but kept outside of it, that players would do everything they could to extend combat. In some cases they fought with the Director when the person running the game tried to end it! We had unintentionally incentivized players to turn combat into slogs. So we tried to make a rule that said, “When the Director says combat is over, it’s over.” Thus the Dramatic Finish rule was born (and is still in the game). However, saying, “The Director decides when you’re done,” was still setting up that person to be in a fight. We had to do more than just say, “The Director is always right,” to serve the needs and fun of all players.

We started playing around with the idea that heroic resources don’t last from battle to battle. We struggled with it for a while, but in the meantime we came up with the idea of Recoveries. After a trip to Gateway Con 2023, we also developed the ideas for Victories. With that gameplay loop firmly in place, we started to diversify our heroic resources, which had gotten homogenous. Then it was all about balancing the rate at which you earn and spend your Stamina, Recoveries, Victories, and resources, something we did time and time again to find the sweet spot of fun for each class.

Resisting and Clearing Debuffs

In a game where hits happen automatically, how should debuffs work? We’ve gone through so many different iterations of this. First we had Armor Points, which could reduce incoming damage. If a damage was reduced to 0, you suffered no effect with it and got to Counterattack. If you did suffer an effect, it generally just lasted until the end of your next turn. This didn’t feel right though. Why would armor prevent a talent from making your mind dazed? Shouldn’t there be some debuffs that could last longer? Well what if your characteristic scores were used as defenses instead and every debuff had a value that you could decrease at the end of your turn and when the value is 0, the debuff is cleared? Turns out that can lead to the piling on of endless debuffs and add a lot of math to the game to slow it down. Once again, we tried a whole bunch of different mechanics, and ultimately settled upon the resistance roll made to defeat an incoming effect … and you all didn’t like that after the first playtest either because it slowed the game down with extra rolling.

For a while there was no way to resist incoming effects. We tried it just by having the result of the attacker’s power roll be the thing that determines if there is a buff or debuff. This was fast, but you also didn’t love not getting a chance to avoid a harmful debuff. It didn’t feel fair. It also meant combat had way too many debuffs to track!

Finally we came up with potencies, which we showed off in this post and called them condition gates. You liked them (though we could have presented the rules more clearly) and we did too. It took a lot of work, but we got there.

Initiative

We figured out how initiative should work in this game pretty early on. But it did take a few playtests! Like this one. Then this one! Finally this one, which is really close to the system we currently use.

Monsters

This game has two core rulebooks, and one is full of monsters to battle! As we changed core rules, monsters had to change as well. You can see what one of our first fully fleshed out goblins looked like as well as some of our first minions and solo creatures. We were tweaking things constantly behind the scenes, especially when it came to minions. We tried to make monsters as simple as possible, but our testers thought they were too simple. It wasn’t until we had a very intense week of in-person testing together and then went to Gen Con that we cracked the code and figured out the right balance of monster complexity and the inclusion of Villain Power (now called Malice) that made the Director’s role more fun!

Classes

We’ve always known that we wanted Draw Steel to be a class-based RPG in which you pick a class and an ancestry. You can see how our classes evolved as core rules changed and we developed more of the game by checking out these posts:

You can also read about us designing an ancestry here, and behold our now defunct idea for a career path.

Kits

How did weapons and armor become kits? Read on below!

Negotiation

Let’s talk about our negotiation system. You can see how it has evolved over time in these posts:

Lore

Some of the best posts here are the ones Matt wrote about the lore of the timescape. I’ve gathered them below.

But What Have You Done Lately?

Okay, with the past out of the way, I wanted to give you all a little update of where things stand currently.

Core Books: In Edit

The design team has finished up the final playtest revisions to the core books. So they’re coming soon, right? Sadly no. We’ve got 800 pages to edit and then lay out. We want to do this right and not rush things, so you likely won’t see a completed PDF of the books until Summer at earliest.

So What Are You Doing?

The design team is still putting some finishing touches and final checks on everything in the core books. Then we’ll all work with the editors and layout folks to make the best books possible. However, that will only fill MUCH of our time and not ALL of it. So … we’re also working on future products. Djordi is diving deep into working on the Codex. Willy is working on the Summoner and a new goblins ancestry. (You read that plural correctly.) I’m going to adventure town. These projects are already underway and we’re kicking off more in the weeks to come.

That’s it for now! I’m excited to catch ya next week with more cool stuff!

—James